George Carlin, 1937-2008

It is said of a man that you cannot know how far he has come unless you know where he began. Perhaps on the occasion of George Carlin’s death this might be said as well about American comedy in the last half century and so also of America, itself.

Carlin’s 1972 Class Clown was the first comedy album I ever bought. It was dedicated “to Leonard Schneider for taking all the risks." But like Schneider, aka Lenny Bruce, Carlin was himself arrested for obscenity, ironically for doing his best known bit from that album, “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.” (As far as I can tell, at least when it comes to broadcast television, the list is still valid.)



I remember earlier appearances of Carlin, clean-shaven, dressed in suit and tie and more wacky than cutting-edge, doing guest appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, his Al Sleet, the hippy-dippy weatherman, cracking Johnny up rattling off a meteorological jargon packed weather report only to end with “But our radar has also just picked up hundreds of ICBMs heading our way, so I wouldn’t sweat the cold front.”

Carlin changed with the times over the course of the sixties and early seventies and, it could also be said, helped in his own small way to change them. The sort of comedy we tolerate, let alone laugh at, says something about us. Carlin was funnier than Bruce, his “observational” eye for the absurd or the merely comical, especially in matters of language, was much sharper than Seinfeld’s and his “transgressiveness” was far more authentic than 99% of the comics that came along after him.

I don’t think it would be too unfair to describe Carlin’s politics as left-libertarian, though the leftist bent often got the better of his libertarian inclinations whenever the two came into conflict. But it is probably more fair to say that Carlin’s comedy was a study in equal opportunity misanthropy, notwithstanding the fact that some targets are just richer than others. Regardless, his was a unique talent. In any ranking of 20th century comedy genius, a pantheon that would include, for example, Groucho Marx and Richard Pryor, George Carlin would almost certainly make the Top Ten.

Herewith, a 2005 Carlin interview with the Onion A.V. Club.